An Opengear Case Study

Summary

Myriad Supply is a cybersecurity consultancy and global provider of hardware and software solutions from top manufacturers. As part of its offerings, the New York City-headquartered company securely prepares, configures, and deploys racks of network equipment on behalf of its clients – many of which have branch offices and other remote sites spread across the United States. Myriad utilizes Opengear’s Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) technology to save significant IT labor hours and costs by pushing equipment configurations with “rack-at-a-time” efficiency. Opengear’s solutions also deliver Myriad’s clients secure cellular-based Out-of-band access and management. Doing so ensures the network equipment is always online and available – even when primary connectivity goes down.

The Challenge

Since 2003, Myriad has guided enterprises through the process of defining, designing, and executing business-critical technology improvements, offering a range of networking equipment, expert consulting, and global logistics services that meet businesses’ evolving needs for network infrastructure deployment, reliability, and optimization. With Myriad, customers can utilize any heterogenous collection of network equipment that meets their unique use case. Myriad will take receipt of the equipment, perform pre-configuration, validate it and burn it in, and then ship the equipment rack to a client’s branch office or remote site. The business then only needs to plug in the equipment for that network infrastructure to be online and fully operational. To meet the challenge of handling client requests that demand a higher volume and complexity of network device needs, Myriad realized it required a solution capable of automating and significantly expediting equipment configurations (while still supporting Myriad’s vendor-agnostic mandate).

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In addition to the automation challenge, Myriad serves many organizations – including service providers, hosting companies, financial services firms, higher education facilities, healthcare providers, retailers and more – with network infrastructure spanning multiple remote locations. Those dispersed facilities often do not have dedicated IT personnel on-site; instead, administrators at a centralized location need the ability to remotely access and troubleshoot equipment at those sites. If connectivity at those sites goes down and they become inaccessible by remote methods, personnel must physically travel to the site to troubleshoot issues and bring equipment back online. This circumstance often means paying for an expensive, long-distance flight, taking a technician away from his or her normal duties, and prolonged downtime that negatively impacts a business’ operations and reputation. As a provider of security, access, and management solutions, Myriad sought out an out-of-band solution that could provide reliable 4G-LTE cellular-based backup connectivity, and meaningfully transform how clients are able to manage sites and maintain uptime to keep their customers and employees satisfied.

The Solution

Myriad selected Opengear for both its Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and Smart OOB out-of-band access and management capabilities. With ZTP, Opengear allows Myriad to both simplify and accelerate the process of preparing client equipment for shipment. ZTP enables Myriad to work with any piece of network equipment, configure it, and deliver it to the end user quickly – regardless of its manufacturer or the quantity, volume, or complexity of the solution. Rather than pushing a configuration to each individual device one by one, Opengear’s technology empowers Myriad’s engineers to deploy configurations an entire rack at a time with readily-available console access to all racked equipment.

In seeking an out-of-band solution, Myriad was drawn to Opengear’s ability to add secondary network connectivity via cellular 3G or 4G-LTE. Myriad now recommends Opengear’s OOB devices on all racks it configures for clients; doing so has been a surefire way to deliver secure access and management of remote sites if and when a primary connectivity fails. The technology integrator deploys Opengear for its internal IT infrastructure needs as well.

“Our clients tend to share certain attributes: multi-tenancy, geographic diversity, large user bases, and unwavering requirements for availability and security,” said Rick Kenney, VP of Engineering, Myriad Supply. “Opengear enables us to provide our clients access to diverse data centers—whether it’s their own facility or a colocation facility—and a consistent management experience. That is one of the best things about Opengear’s out-of-band management for us: it’s just so easy to deploy, configure, and provide, which makes the traditional burden of managing remote locations nonexistent.“

The Results

The automation and efficiency benefits Opengear provides simplifies complete otherwise burdensome configuration tasks for Myriad. For example, the integrator has a quickly scaling client that purchases several racks of equipment as often as 15 times each month. The task of configuring that much equipment manually would be a huge challenge. In contrast, with Opengear making it possible to consistently push configurations full rack by full rack, Myriad can deliver requested solutions on time and at a price point that is smart for both Myriad and its customer. In the case of the rapidly growing client, a Myriad integration engineer is able to rack, stack, and connect equipment to an Opengear device, and complete configurations in less than two hours – a task that would otherwise require up to two days.

Additionally, by providing them with Opengear equipment, Myriad clients gain secure cellular-based out-of-band management over their own remote sites. Doing so allows them to maintain business continuity and guarantee service for their own customers even when primary connectivity becomes unavailable.

“Leveraging Opengear’s out-of-band management means getting services back online within minutes instead of hours or days,” said Kenney. “Considering the costs of an international flight and downtime, it’s a really huge savings. In many instances, the cost of the device is a fraction of what just the flight would be, let alone the time and effort.“

Myriad Supply

IT Services

Myriad Supply is a cybersecurity consultancy and global provider of hardware and software solutions from top manufacturers. With a security-first approach, Myriad guides enterprises to define, design, and implement business-critical technology improvements within the areas of security, SDN, mobility, and cloud. To learn more, visit www.MyriadSupply.com or email hello@myriadsupply.com.

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"Leveraging Opengear’s out-of-band management means getting services back online within minutes instead of hours or days. Considering the costs of an international flight and downtime, it’s a really huge savings. In many instances, the cost of the device is a fraction of what just the flight would be, let alone the time and effort." Rick Kenney
VP of Engineering at Myriad Supply